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So what is the tangzhong method?

Anyone who’s ever made a pudding cake has, for all intents and purposes, employed the tangzhong method. It’s the same basic idea: you add a pre-prepared starch gel to your batter/dough and what you get in return is a finished product that’s higher and lighter than it would otherwise be, that retains more moisture and that has a very tight and even crumb. The big difference of course that in a tangzhong (essentially “soup starter” in Chinese) there’s no sugar or flavorings in the mix — just flour and water combined at a ratio of 1-5 and cooked to roughly 150 degrees Fahrenheit.

But then what does the tangzhong gel do in the bread dough? It’s a very good question since baked bread is already a starch gel to some extent. But let’s back up a bit. Flour (white flour) as you’ll recall is nothing more than the finely ground endosperm of the wheat berry. Think of the endosperm as a dense pack of very long and stringy starch molecules all packed in together. Grind it and you get endosperm granules, which I think of as tightly bound bundles of sticks.

What happens when you get those bundles wet and hot? They start to come apart. Water molecules start working their way between the starches in the bundle. The bundle swells. As the process continues individual starch molecules start to break away from the bundles. If there’s a whole lot of water around the starches will actually float off and get tangled up with other stringy breakaway starches. The end result is a mesh of much smaller starch bundles and tangled starch molecules which traps and holds the water molecules around them. In other words, a gel.

Notice that the extent to which the process goes on is directly related to how much water there is in the mixture. If there’s some water but not a whole lot you won’t have a proper gel but something that’s often called “gelated” starch: a mass of starch granules that are dissolved only slightly, just enough so that a few starch molecules come loose and more or less tie all the granules together.

That works pretty well for the purposes of bread making. However this sort of structure is highly prone to what you might call a gelling reversal, which starts to happen as soon as the bread cools. The large granules start to contract and when they do they squeeze out the water molecules that had initially worked their way into them. The water then evaporates, the matrix hardens and you’re left with stale bread.

But what if you were to take steps to undermine the staling process by oh say, adding a very wet pre-made gel to the dough in the mixing step? You’d be introducing a whole bunch of small starch bundles and free starch molecules with lots and lots of water molecules trapped in between them — molecules that won’t be easily forced out of the matrix because they’re only loosely held by free starches, not crammed inside big granules that will eventually squeeze them out.

So you see that adding a tangzhong to a bread dough is very different than simply adding more water to a bread dough. When you add a tangzhong to a dough you’re not simply adding moisture, you’re adding a moisture-retaining structure that does double duty as a mechanical leavener, since the thick gel surrounds air bubbles in the rising dough, giving them more resilient walls and preventing them from popping. So you get a higher loaf in the bargain. And because the all the water in the gel undermines gluten development the individual bubbles never get very big, which means a very fine crumb. Also, the loaf is very tender and again because of all the moisture there is almost no crust.

15 thoughts on “So what is the tangzhong method?”

Sooooo could one use this technique with any bread in an effort to delay the staling process? I currently use lecithin.
Also, does the same process for the gelatinization apply if one were to use whole wheat flour?

Any bread at all. And yes, you can make a tangzhong out of whole wheat flour, though the gel won’t be as smooth and silky. I’m told that a tangzhong can even lighten an entirely whole grain bread. I’m skeptical, but stranger things have happened!

I wonder if the addition of pre-gelated starch accounts for the similar properties of potato bread, where cooked mashed potatoes are added to the dough, and which often has a very tight crumb and is quite soft in comparison to plain wheat bread?

One thing I’m curious about is how to shape tangzhong loaves. Once and only once, I managed to achieve the nice, organized vertical strands of gluten that you can almost peel apart instead of the matrix you might find in sandwich breads. Since then, I haven’t been able to replicate it!

I made cinnamon rolls this weekend using the Hokkaido Milk Bread as a basis. The recipe called for rolling and folding and rolling the dough again. The finished product, though, was delicious. Can’t wait to see what you do!

I read about the tangzhong method a few months ago and was interested enough to try it. However, I didn’t go for the sweet milk bread that the method is famous for. Instead I wanted to see what difference it would make with my basic everyday bread that I bake twice a week year around. So I just took out proper percentages of water and flour from my ordinary recipe, made a tangzhong gel from them and mixed it with the rest of the ingredients.

Results: the crust was thinner than normal and very flaky, the crumb was softer and more moist than normal. The bread was a good eat about 12, even 15 hours later, and I’m quite picky about freshness of bread. Our kids, 1 and 4 years old, also liked it the next day, and they’re very picky about softness!

For the record, my recipe calls for Finnish bread flour (the “dark” type which is the most common bread flour type around here) with 70% hydration plus 25% old dough (same hydration) mixed in, yeast and salt.